


Doubt

by Minutia_R



Category: Lackadaisy
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 11:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13786521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: Mordecai knew the difference between what was real and the things he saw out of the corner of his eye when he'd been awake for three days because the inside of his head was too loud for him to sleep. He'd had years to learn the distinction.





	Doubt

Mordecai knew the difference between what was real and the things he saw out of the corner of his eye when he'd been awake for three days because the inside of his head was too loud for him to sleep. He'd had years to learn the distinction.

His family had never been the sort to go to shul. His mother had lit candles on Friday night and then kept doing her piecework by their light, and that was as far as religion went. He'd believed in God when he was young, in the fuzzy way people do without thinking much about it, but he'd given that up too. Since the raid that night, with Viktor--since the whispers and the flashes of light and movement that could never quite be seen head-on--he couldn't let himself believe in anything that couldn't be reduced to numbers: solid, reliable, well-behaved.

The crazed gunwoman had spoken of a crossroads in life, a crisis point, a moment when all seemed lost. A cheap rhetorical trick, designed to convince the credulous that a fortune-teller had some access to esoteric knowledge when none was required for such a general observation that might apply to anyone.

So if it had stirred a memory in him--if he heard, again, a voice too soft and deep to quite make out words, the lazy slosh of stagnant water--if he saw the sinuous movement of something too big to grasp at once and smelled the salt tang of an estuary entirely different from the Hudson--that was just his senses playing up, new irrationality superimposed upon a memory too old for that.

He had said no, thank you. But when she’d taken a knife and carved into his flesh, he hadn’t fought back. And that was just sense: you didn’t fight back when someone had a knife on you.

Mordecai would find that rationalization much easier to believe if that was the kind of sense he’d ever had before.


End file.
